Neuroscience excels at unraveling the mind from the bottom up. But our self-consciousness seems to require a top down approach.
As novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?" The paradox of neuroscience is that its astonishing progress has exposed the limitations of its paradigm, as reductionism has failed to solve our emergent mind. Much of our experiences remain outside its range.
While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain, these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.
Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole.
This world of human experience is the world of the arts. The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym. They strive to capture life as it's lived. Artists have been studying such emergent phenomena for centuries and have constructed elegant models of human consciousness that manage to express the texture of our experience, distilling the details of real life into prose and plot. That's why their novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.
Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.
In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set, providing science with a glimpse into its blind spots. Until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective, our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves. Art can make science better.
Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward, and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.
Source: Why Science Needs Art by Jonah Lehrer in SHIFT: At The Frontiers of Consciousness, September-November 2008